Agnes Said:

I would like to change careers to become a dental hygenist. What would it take?

We Answered:

Check with the admissions office of the community college you would enroll at for the 2 year course. They will check your credits to see if you have the required amount for admission. They will also let you know the tuition and other costs and will send you to the financial aids office to find out about any available grants for you. Good luck.

Marvin Said:

What's the best way for a working adult to change careers?

We Answered:

You are still young enough to successfully change careers into IT. Are you still working and do you work for the government or are you working for a 3rd party vendor who answers calls for the government? Reason why I ask is because it is best to transition into IT at your existing company if you are working for a 3rd party vendor/Fortune 1000 corporation.

If not then you should look on Career Builder, Monster.com for job postings for web developers and network engineers. The postings will show a specific list of skills, requirements and certifications needed. From there you can do your research on how to best go about acquiring those skills. It also depends on what you want to do in Network, because there are engineers and then there are also project managers/program managers. You can obtain a PMP certification and become a project manager in IT leading large scale network implementation projects. But it also depends if you are technically inclined and want to be an individual contributor vs. becoming a manager/supervisor. Web developers generally do not need any degrees, yet if you apply for a Fortune 500 company they will want a BA at minimum. Most of the web developer skills can be acquired by learning on your own at home (HTML, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premier, Photoshop, CSS) Since you are not a "teach yourself" type of person you can probably find on-line classes or perhaps classes at a community college that will teach you the basics.

If you want to make a career out of it working for a large company so you can get benefits then your best bet is to get hired by any Fortune 500 company in their customer service department (since that is where your experience is.) Be a top performer so your manager will identify you as a succession candidate. This way you can work out your career development plan and work towards transitioning into IT or internal communications within 4 years. You are better off doing it this way because you could either spend 4 years in school making no income or you can build up 4 years of experience and 401k etc in a company that has the resources to transfer you into your field of interest. BA in Econ is a good base line degree. Let your new employer pay for you to pursue certifications and further education. Fortune 500 companies ALL have tuition reimbursement programs.

Gene Said:

Anyone have any experiences changing careers, especially from engineering ? What did you change to ?

We Answered:

There are several alternative careers out there for someone with a degree in engineering. I agree that the engineering job market is not as good as people make it out to be, but that's a discussion for another day. Personally I've stuck with it, but know there are other opportunities out there. As others mentioned you can always get your teaching certificate (many schools will allow you to teach while you're working on it) and teach high school math and science.

If you're willing to go back to school you can go back for your JD and become a patent lawyer. If you're still young med. school may not be out of the question, although you'd likely also need about one year of additional undergrad. coursework in organic chem. and biology. On the business side, you could always try to parlay your scientific knowledge into a job in sales or go back for an MBA and work in finance. You could also take some journalism courses and try to land a job as a technical writer or science journalist.

These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head. A really excellent resource for those considering non-traditional careers in science is Cynthia Robbins book "Alternative Careers in Science". Each chapter of the book was written by someone who made a career change out of science and it details their individual experiences.